Too often the board is a resource hiding in plain sight. A fully engaged and trained board can transform your organization.
CauseKit Blog
DEI as a Fiduciary Responsibility
If your board is not actively engaged in the critical and very often challenging work of championing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) at your organization, you’re falling short of your fiduciary oversight role.
What works? Strategies to attract the board members we need
We began this series by asking the question, “Who is not in your boardroom?” Recently, we posed the follow-up question, “What are the biggest challenges you face in building a board that reflects the diversity of the communities you service?” In a survey of our nonprofit partners, the following four reasons rose to the top, accounting for the majority of responses: Lack of access to […]
The costs of a diversity quota
Most boards actively seek people of color in their board recruitment and development efforts. But in their pursuit of racial diversity, some boards take an “any person of color will do” approach to grow their board. It is not enough to know that people hold nuanced identities.
The case for Black board leadership
Black people serve on boards. Black people should be considered for nonprofit boards. Black people’s contributions on nonprofit boards should be valued in the same way that contributions from other board members are. Here are three reasons it is important for Black leaders to be in nonprofit boardrooms.
What does it mean to have a board that reflects the community we serve?
Most organizations have a sense of their unique and pressing needs. But over the past two years, the single most common response among the nonprofits we speak to is: “We want to have a board that better reflects the community we serve.” When pressed for more clarity, this typically boils down to wanting more racial and ethnic diversity on the board.
The State of the Nonprofit Sector in 2017
By Erin M. Connell, Consultant at Cause Strategy Partners, LLC Those who work in the nonprofit sector know there have been major shifts recently within the field. Economic hurdles, dramatic political shifts, and innovative technologies have all changed the face of the nonprofit world. At Cause Strategy Partners, we serve as witness and counsel to many organizations facing these challenges; through consulting […]
The Future of Arts Nonprofits in a New Political Landscape
By Meryl Friedman, Graduate Fellow at Cause Strategy Partners, LLC As part of a collaboration with New York Community Trust (NYCT), our team at Cause Strategy Partners launched our first issue-focused BoardLead program in NYC last Fall called BoardLead Arts NYC. We set out to strengthen nonprofit arts organizations by training and placing diverse, talented, and driven professionals on their boards. […]